


with rose-tinted virtues

by Neko-no-Tsuki (LunaKat)



Series: Barking Up The Right Tree (InuKag Week 2020) [1]
Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Inukag Week 2020, Post-Canon, Prompt Fic, Sunsets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24608929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/Neko-no-Tsuki
Summary: For InuKag Week 2020. Day 1: Acceptance/PinkHe wonders if she knows that, framed in a rosy halo, she looks lovely as a homecoming.
Relationships: Higurashi Kagome/InuYasha
Series: Barking Up The Right Tree (InuKag Week 2020) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779043
Comments: 10
Kudos: 39





	with rose-tinted virtues

His memories of his mother are steeped in pink.

Inuyasha isn’t sure why that particular color sticks out so firmly when he thinks of her. Maybe it’s because her scent was always sweetened with camellia or because her painted kisses would always leave rosy smears on his scalp. Maybe because the way she smiled always brought attention to the rouge that painted her lips, or maybe because her whole face flushed in the most prettily tragic way when she cried. Maybe because her outer robes were colored like and patterned with sakura-petals. Maybe it’s because it was always the pink flowers that she would tuck behind her ears, weaving them into the inky silk of her hair whenever he brought them to her.

It’s been a long time since he thought about her. Longer than he should, probably. Her memory is one of those sacred things that should be desperately protected from the outside world. It was bad enough when Sesshomaru turned her into a weapon, only to cut down the very illusion he conjured, face pale and unfeeling as snow-capped mountains save for those magenta stripes searing across his cheekbones. He dares not imagine if someone even more ruthless got their hands on her.

But he’s thinking about her now. His mother feels terrifyingly alive in the coral-colored yukata of the girl—not quite a woman, not yet, still flush with adolescence—who stumbled out of the forest earlier today, old cuts riddling her arms and a flush of exertion smearing her dirt-crusted face. The girl that Rin happened to discover while picking flowers, bringing her back to the village despite the practiced distrust in her eyes and the way she stiffened whenever anyone looked to the bundle in her arms. The girl who would gently shush the pink-faced baby swaddled in dusty rose cloth, and it did not take much for Inuyasha to notice the peculiarities in the child’s scent, in his appearance—the pure and unbroken green of his eyes, the florid camellia petals that sprouted from his scalp in place of hair, the leaves peppering his pudgy wrists and ankles, the bark-like texture of the skin tracing his spine.

“My brother,” the girl would say to any prying eyes. The “half” was unspoken, but implied, and cut sharp enough to draw shared blood.

They arrived when dawn painted the sky in peach, when the daylight was still dewy with the kindness of a beginning. Now, twilight steeps the world in a magenta so lurid it threatens to blot everything else out beneath its pink oppression, dyed dark and lovely in a painful parting. Inuyasha perches in the protection of a cedar branch, falling back into old habits more easily than he would have liked, looking out at a world stained in the color of his mother’s memory.

It isn’t long before a sweetness drifts through the air, a jasmine-sharp loveliness that he knows so well. He turns his head just in time to catch Kagome surfacing from the undergrowth, a blessing in a poor disguise.

“ _There_ you are,” she mock-huffs once she spots him, like red doesn’t stand out sharply against green and she couldn’t see him from the treeline. But the annoyance is more a front than anything, and the primrose of her lips is already curling into a teasing half-smile.

He mutters something under his breath that sounds like “Where’d ya _think_ I was?”, but there’s no real heat in it, and it’s too soft for her to hear.

Without even pausing to acknowledge the remark, she broaches the cedar canopy’s shadow, and he watches from his periphery as the fuchsia heavens fall heavy over her form. There’s something in the way she approaches the base of the trunk—with no weapons and no reservations, with nothing but her heart beating in her hand—that speaks to a higher being, to a sort of creature that steps out of time with the rest of the world and isn’t afraid to, either. Even when she willingly chose this world over her own, closing the gap between centuries and clothing herself in a miko’s duty, it was in no way a concession to abide by the boundaries that were drawn long before anyone can remember. If anything, he thinks she’ll sometimes cross lines others would warily shy away from for the sole purpose of proving that those lines can be crossed, and it is admirable even as it is heedless.

“C’mon down from there.” The pink tones make auburn the amusement dancing in the brown of her irises. Rosy light ripples over her form, tickles the whiteness of her kimono top into a pale peach and casts coral-colored shadows across the planes of her lovely face. “I’m not yelling up at a tree.”

For a moment, he considers ignoring the request and remaining rooted firmly to his spot. Trees have always been a comfort in a way that people usually fail to be, far more reliable and far less fickle and far less likely to drop him for being less-than-human. Even now, with contentedness having slipped like the ripening flush of pinkening persimmon skin, there is still something vaguely uncomfortable about closing the distance. It’s too willful, too contrary to everything he knows and everything the world has ever taught him, to the harsh and cold reality that has been shoved in his face since his mother died, and even before then. Grass is a prickly place to stand on, and sometimes the air will get too tight if there’s another person nearby, because there’s some part of him still subconsciously waiting for the hammer to drop. But then again, this is Kagome they’re talking about—she’s always been an exception in all the ways that count.

It says something, he thinks, that she doesn’t flinch when he lands. His speed is an unnatural thing, must look to her eyes like a blur of scarlet and silver bleeding into a single shape, and most people would at least tense up in alarm. He has seen the way faces shift with fear, the realization that fleeing for freedom would be a pointless endeavor if he ever decided to hunt men rather than converse with them.

But Kagome only rewards him with a wry look. “So what were you sulking about this time?”

“I don’t _sulk_ ,” he snaps. Or pout, or brood, or any of that other crap, no matter what she says. Geez, it’s like he can’t even _think_ without her teasing him.

Not that he minds too much—especially not when she lets out a chiming little laugh, bright and sweet and drifting through the rose-dyed air like the advent of spring itself. “Sure you don’t, oh Mr. Big-and-Macho.”

“Keh.” His arms are folded over his ribcage in a valiant effort to ignore the pinkening flush rising along his neck (and did he _always_ get embarrassed this easily?). From above, indigo is encroaching upon the fuchsia twilight, and it looks like a boot coming down to squash an overripe fruit. “How’re the brats?”

“Settling down.” Following his lead, Kagome turns to face the sunset as well. It probably doesn’t have the same connotations that it does to him, the color not as bittersweet and aching, but oh, how beautiful she looks with that rosy taint over her skin. “I think Ajisai-chan is finally startling to realize we won’t take Hanahiko-chan away if she takes her eyes off him a minute.”

“Good,” he grunts, though he can’t really blame the girl for her suspicion. He has a feeling that it was hard earned, hard won, and will be even harder to put to rest.

She claps her hands behind her back, kimono sleeves curtaining the length of her arms. Despite the softening of the peachy tones, white still grates hard against crimson, two contrary colors warring against amalgamating into soft pink. In some ways, the miko raiment suits her, but in other ways it looks all wrong, because the stark separation in the color of her clothes fails to make her soul follow suit. “I offered to let them stay with us for a little while. I hope that’s okay?”

The way she says it makes it sound like something so simple, as though it weren’t the bravest thing he’s ever seen. And not for the first time, he finds himself wondering if she understands just how much she is doing, how grand a gesture this is, how this will continue to ripple out into infinity with only a flicker of a whim. If she knows what it _means_ to someone who learned the hard way that normal people don’t open their homes to you, that it’s perfectly normal for them to scorn you for something you can’t control, that it keeps happening until you become convinced that _you_ are the problem.

He wonders if she knows that, framed in a rosy halo, she looks lovely as a homecoming.

“Gonna be loud,” he grumbles, which is the best way he can say _I would have if you hadn’t_ without sounding like a total jackass.

Words fatten in the silence that beats between them, but they choose to bide their patience in the space between breaths rather than taking shape in rolling vowels and choppy consonants. He can feel her gaze roving over the contours of his silhouette, searching for something he doesn’t know the name of but knows as intimately as his own heartbeat and hates to let her see. The world and all its harshness lacks the vice-grip that it once had over him, but it still lingers in spidery shadows at the corners of his vision, and there are dulcet whispers that plague him at odd hours. They sound oddly like voices he’d thought he’d forgotten, cruel jeers from distant relatives who renounced his mortal mother and branded him a youkai first, a human second.

He can still remember the day he first saw his mother’s strength flag—the way her pretty face crumpled, the way her shoulders bowed beneath an invisible defeat, the way tears traced crystal streams down cheeks. How the warmth in her arms radiated through the fuchsia folds of her overclothes, an elusive embrace he taught himself to relish, because she was the only one who could ever stand to touch him.

Abruptly, Kagome steps closer, crossing a distance dyed in florid fuchsia, her teeth worrying at her lower lip. She brushes against his edges, not-quite-touching, but it’s far more than anyone before her ever dared. And he wonders what his mother would think of her, if the woman dressed in pink had the chance to meet the one wearing white and red.

Perhaps the silence stretches too long, because Kagome suddenly blurts, “He’s not that loud.” To Inuyasha’s bemused look, she adds, a little hastily, “Hanahiko-chan, I mean. Doesn’t cry. Er, well, he _does_ , but. Not as much as you’d think? He’s more... You know what I mean, right?”

“I dunno shit about babies,” he admits with a shrug. “But if we’re settin’ the bar at the twins...”

“Why? Were they loud?” Her confusion is genuine and it takes him a minute to remember that she wasn’t there, when they were born, because those years-without-Kagome feel more and more like a bad dream with each new dawn. She was still stuck on the other side of the well when the twins came into the world, looking shriveled and scalded and blotchy pink as any precious beginning.

“What, Sango didn’t tell you?” She arches a brow, intrigued, and he goes on, “They cried all fucking day and night. I ended up having to sleep in the woods, they were so loud. And even then, I _still_ heard ‘em!”

Amusement carves a smile from her lips, at that. “You’re joking. Really?”

“Gods, I wish.” Goddamn newborns. At least this “Hanahiko” brat looks a few months old. Like, it’s still _way_ too young to be without a mother, but at least...

A clucking noise of sympathy. Peach kisses at the edges of her face while the sun slips further into the horizon. “Even in the woods?”

“Feh. Only ‘cause my ears’re better than most...” He trails off as the sunset calls his attention again, magenta making its slow transition into deep violet, the color so violently vivid it seems to be raging war against its own demise. The defiance is almost admirable in a way, even if there is futility in it.

It hits him, with an odd clarity, that the hue from daylight’s collapse must be skimming along the edges of his silhouette—that light must be running rosy fingers through the silver of his hair and casting florid fuchsia shadows over his profile. And something about that thought makes him feel oddly guilty, like a child caught doing something they haven’t been _explicitly_ told is bad but still know they aren’t supposed to do. Surely it isn’t fair for him to end up cast in such a color, a shade so beautifully rare that it almost hurts to look at. Because he has no claim to this color the way others do, and it is foreign to him in a way it never should have been but ended up being anyway, so distant and dream-hazy that he hardly even knows it.

“...It’s a stupid name,” he says, suddenly.

“What is?”

“‘Hanahiko’. Who the hell names their kid that?” Kagome looks at him, puzzled, but his mind is too full with remembering the way that girl, Ajisai or whatever, held her brother up for him to get a better look at Inuyasha’s face, and her own eyes were lit with something he wishes he could forget. “It’s fucking tacky. And _seriously_ not manly. And—”

And then Kagome is brushing up against him, actually touching this time, and the warm in her skin bleeds through the division of her clothes to meet him. “Alright. What’s going on?”

If this were anyone else, Inuyasha could probably clamp up and harbor his secrets until the grave came calling—but this is Kagome, and she’s always been the exception in all the ways that count—so he heaves a heavy sigh and lets his defenses droop. “You didn’t see it, did you?”

That has her perking up, somewhere between concerned and curious. “See what?”

His throat tightens uncomfortably. “The way she looked at me.”

“Who?” Kagome draws back a little, blinking. “Ajisai-chan?” When his only response is for his mouth to tighten into a hard line, a furrow comes over her brows and something fierce flashes across her face—a pointed, protective edge. “No. I guess I didn’t. How did she look at you?”

Thinking back to this morning makes him wince—he remembers the girl, the way she stilled at the sight of him, this not-yet-woman with fierce eyes and coral-colored clothes and hard edges to her silhouette that belied the tenderness with which she cradled her burden. “Well. It was. Kinda like...” He grits his teeth as he recalls the sureness in her approaching steps, the way she searched his silhouette like she was cataloguing all his pieces and how they worked together in a sort of broken harmony, and saw something there that made her soften at the edges. “Y’know. All _awed_ and shit.”

Immediately, the hardness unlocks from Kagome’s expression. Her smile is a candid little thing, lacks the harsh angles of judgement, but he can see the teasing glint growing behind her gaze. “And that’s bad?”

“It’s _weird_ ,” he snaps. There’s a _reason_ he turned heel and got the hell out of there before she could say anything.

“But not bad,” Kagome points out gently.

“I ain’t a good example,” he says, because before he met her, he was a creature that had forged itself along crimson edges and broken pieces and the desire to slice soft things like her ribbons. And even if they were wrong to do so, there’s a _reason_ people always saw him as a predator.

With the fearlessness of a woman who has walked time’s tightrope, she bumps her shoulder against his bicep, right against one of those sharp edges that she has sanded down with her very own hands. A gentle meeting between white and red. “I dunno. You’re pretty noble—well, when you’re not out-cursing sailors and insulting people.”

“I’m serious, Kagome.”

“So am I.” And she is. He can see it in the steady hold of her gaze, the primrose patience that smooths its way across her skin, the slow conviction in the curve of her brows. And not for the first time, he marvels at this miracle that somehow fell into his lap, and wonders what he did to deserve such a reward. “It’s really not that strange. I mean, she came here because she heard about this ‘hanyou protector’, right? It’s only natural—”

“But I’m not—”

“Inuyasha—”

“Look!” he interrupts, all broken pieces that have been painfully and painstakingly put back together but still remember how it felt to be fractured. “The only reason I am who I am now is ‘cause of _you_ , okay? And if I _hadn’t_ met you, I’d still be miserable and shitty and probably terrorizing a village somewhere. S-So it’s not like...”

It’s not like he turned out as great as he could have. And while he’s sure his mother wouldn’t begrudge the person he is now—with companions who could care less about the divisions in his blood, with a village that has reluctantly allowed him to bleed into their numbers, with a woman who looks at him as a whole rather than in ratios of youkai and human—he wonders if she would be disappointed to learn that he almost didn’t make it. That the moment death detached her from his side, he began to slow process of forgetting himself, burying his human heart inside her grave and leaving it to rot there until Kagome came along and coaxed it back into his ribs. Everything he has now, everything he _is_ now, is all owed to her a thousand times over—and it feels unspeakably dishonest for _anyone_ to call him an _exemplar_ in _any_ sense of the word, when so much of who he is belongs to another.

Surprise propels her a step backward, and the space between immediately fills with fading fuchsia. “I really don’t think I did that much.”

He manages to bite back the wry chuckle just in time, because it dawns on him belatedly that she is completely serious, and all he can do is stare in dumbfounded bewilderment. “The _hell_ you didn’t. I was an asshole!” A brief pause, followed by a halfhearted wince. “Still kind of am, actually...”

“You are not.” The response is gentle and automatic all at once, her first instinct to soothe hurt where she finds it, and that says something, he thinks.

“Are so!” he protests. “Yesterday, Sango asked me to watch the kids, but I ended up dumpin’ ‘em on Rin!” No sooner has he finished speaking than he realizes that he just wasted all his efforts in bribing the girl to keep quiet. He flicks his gaze over to Kagome, noting the flat disapproval in her stare, and even though the nenju no longer hangs around his throat in a beaded shackle, he can’t help but tense in anticipation. “But. Uh. I feel super bad about it...?”

A brief pause spans between them, tactile with judgement. Finally, she goes, “Okay, so you’re a _little_ bit of an asshole. _But_ ,” she adds, pointedly, “you’re _also_ incredibly sweet, deep down, so I think you’ll be okay.”

“Woman, I am _not_ —”

His protest is cut short by her hand closing around his. No fear of the claws tipping his fingers, no hesitation about the youki clinging to his skin—and though darkness is baring down from above, the magenta vestiges of daylight slipping further and further away, he can still feel the sun’s warmth when she smiles. “It’ll be okay. Trust me.”

How she can say things like that and still not understand how much she has done to him, _for_ him, will forever remain a mystery. Because Kagome is the exception to every rule, the outlier that steps over lines that most would never dare to even look at, and she does it without even understanding all the taboos she’s breaking in a single breath. Because even as night is finally settling in the sky, pink tones still cling to the edges of her silhouette like a halo framing a solar eclipse. Because she is brilliant in every capacity, has a soul so deep and vast that even the endless horizon grows envious over it, and somehow she’s been persuaded to carve out a special place just for him.

“Now let’s go back before it gets completely dark?” A light tug and a teasing grin later and he’s completely at her mercy. “They might send a search party out for us, and that would _not_ set a good example.”

“Whatever,” he grumbles, letting her guide him back the way she came. “I’m serious though,” he says to the back of her head, “It’s all ‘cause of you.”

“Sap.”

Behind them, the heavens mourn the loss of their rosy hue for a brief while. But it is a fleeting thing, a swift loss that will be placated the next day. By tomorrow, dawn will grace the sky in a pale peach promise, and all the dark will be lost beneath a brand new beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a little bit of a mess and went through a couple rewrites and now it's more "how has acceptance changed Inuyasha over time", but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. My first time participating in InuKag Week and I'm challenging myself to weave the color prompts into the normal prompts, because I dig thematic shit like that. Hopefully I won't be kicking myself for it later.
> 
> Btw, Ajisai means "hydrangea" and Hanahiko means something like "flower boy" or "flower prince".


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